Our house is bigger on the inside than it looks from on the street
There must be something odd about the way the corners meet.
We warn our friends about it, but they always seem surprised,
And I sometimes can't imagine how our stuff all fits inside.

We have computers, toys, and magazines, and quiet cozy nooks;
The bathroom's lined with cedar planks, and the living room with books.
There's boxes full of god- knows-what in the attic up above,
And we always keep good company and love.

Colleen is halfway buried as she crochets up a quilt
I'm getting in some songs before my voice begins to wilt.
Kids are shouting back in Emmy's room, the pizza's getting hot;
Folks come over every Wednesday whether we're at home or not.

When we moved North to Rainbow's End some things got re-arranged;
The family's gotten bigger, but the main things haven't changed.
Folks are singing in the Great Room, and the chili's getting hot;
They come over every Sunday whether we're at home or not.

We have computers, toys, and magazines, and quiet cozy nooks;
The bathroom's lined with tiles and the living rooms with books.
There's boxes full of god- knows-what in the cupboards up above,
And we always keep good company and love.

There's a gallery of science-fiction pictures in the hall,
And something's taped or bolted on to each square foot of wall.
Our children's closets look just like a baby dragon's hoard;
It's true that we're disorganized, but at least we're seldom bored.

There's a guest crashed on the futon couch who's too wiped out to leave,
And something in the fridge that's been there since last Christmas eve.
We're packed in five dimensions, and through the twilight zone,
It's all the friendly clutter here that makes it feel like home.

Inspired by a friend's account of a visit to our house. At the
Younger Daughter's insistence I have pluralized ``daughters'' in verse 2, and
at the older's insistence changed the name in verse 3.
Now, of course, ``some things got rearranged'', and the former verse 2 has moved
down to verse 4, where ``daughters'' has become ``children''.

I wrote a song last weekend, "Windward". (Here's the original
post for reference; you'll note that the lyrics have changed somewhat
since then.) It quickly became part of a matched set, since it made much
more sense to sing it with the original. Thursday
when we sang them for Emmy, Naomi came up with the title "Travelers" for
the pair.

Parody isn't exactly the right word for it, of course. Adaptation might
be closer. In both cases, what started out as an obvious and silly
throw-away ended up cutting deeper than expected, more of a complement
than a commentary. It's an absolute delight when this happens. (It's
also a delight when you approach the original songwriter worried about
whether you'll still be friends after they've read your lyrics, and their
response is ``This is brilliant!'')

ETA: The Wolfling recorded our debut performance; you'll find her videos
on YouTube. Watch Where The Heart Is and Windward. It came
off surprisingly well for a brand-new song.

It's kind of appropriate, because I just started my new job this week, as
a code monkey. I mean, sure, I have a fancier title than that, but what
it comes down to is picking (mostly) well-defined little coding tasks off
a list and writing the code. OK, we all get some say in the tasks, too,
but it's all part of a huge edifice mostly designed by somebody else.

I've done this before. Recently, even -- what I did on the web services
side of $PREV two years ago was like that. I can do it, and do it well,
but it was demanding without being all that satisfying. I'm worried that
this gig will be similar.

It'll pay the bills, and it'll be challenging and even fun in places, but
I don't think I'm going to love it. (You will note that I am not
going off on a riff comparing the expected experience to various kinds of
casual relationship. This is a Good Thing. Trust me.)

Because I'm surprised that I haven't taken the time to do it earlier, I've
logged on to CD-Baby and dropped the digital download price of Coffee, Computers, &
Song from $15 (which is where they set it by default, I guess) to
$9.99. I probably ought to set it up on Bandcamp, too.

And here's Tear
the fascist down "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it
without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we dont
give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We
wrote it, thats all we wanted to do."

Apparently I missed Sunday. Probably because of having too many
accumulated to-do items between then and Monday. :(

Anyway, I appear to have spent most of the day going up and down the
garage attic stairs, bringing down the last of the old file boxes full of
receipts. (I happen to know that there are still a couple of letter files
and perhaps a drawer or two.) Old receipts really have to be shredded;
they have such things as complete credit card and social security numbers
on them. Those were more innocent times.

A week from yesterday, on Saturday, June 9th, we're having our
last party at Grand Central Starport. It's been a long run, and
a good one. We've thrown at least two parties each year since we moved in
36 years ago, and four most years. Over a hundred parties.

We're moving.

Moving out, moving North, and moving on. Parties at the Starport will
probably continue -- our renters are fannish. We will certainly continue
to have parties, though perhaps not until we move from our apartment to a
house, a year or so down the road.

But... our household, our Starport... yeah. Last chance.

We're also downsizing. A lot. So a lot of things will be up for
grabs. We're giving away a lot of books, because we'd rather see
them go to good homes than get a few cents for them at a used bookshop. A
goodly pile of other stuff. Get it while it's hot.

There will be potluck, and soft drinks in the tub -- bring something you
know you can eat, plus enough to share. There will be filking. There
will be nostalgia.

And I headed west when I had turned twenty
When the foundries and factories had closed
And in my minds eye I thought I might settle
Out here where my father was raised and was born
I worked as a jug-hound a rough-neck a bouncer
I worked where I wanted, I drew damn good pay
Saw no end to our luck and so we just pushed it
But O.P.E.C. and mortgages ate it away.

It's a bit of a grab-bag today. I found myself needing to finally learn
the melody to a couple of songs that I'd so far only played guitar on,
because I want to do them in my upcoming concert at Consonance. You know
that thing about dominos? That.

So the only recordings I could find were back in 2009. And, for some
unaccountable reason, I hadn't put up the audio for that
concert. It soon became clear that one reason I hadn't was that the
performer tags in the audio files were wrong...

... and once I'd fixed that, I decided to put my concert index into a
sensible, most-recent-first format. (It had been most recent
year first, but most recent last within each year.) So
that's done now. And Baycon 2008 didn't have an index.html
file. It does now.

... and if you're still with me, there's a somewhat off-the-wall bonus.
You see, this week the R&D lab I work for publiclyannounced a
subsidiary in India called Ricoh Innovations Private Limited (RIPL)

So what was the first song that popped into my head when first I heard
about it? Right. The Grateful Dead - Ripple. I've been waiting five months
to post that one...

So, to make up for having missed a couple of weeks worth of Saturdays,
you're getting a bonus this week.

After talking it over, Naomi and I decided that it'll be better -- or at
least simpler -- to ask for forgiveness than permission, so the entire
recording of Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012 is now up on the web.

I don't like the way the guitar came out -- sorry about that; if I have
time I'll try to process the other recording I got from hms42. But the performance? Yeah. That worked.

The Bears are a suite of two songs: my semi-autobiographical "A Talk With the
Middle-Sized Bear", and Naomi Rivkis's wonderful parody of it, "A Tribute to the
Middle-Aged Bear". We (or I, if I'm performing solo) usually do them
together. You sort of have to do that with the really good parodies,
otherwise lines have a tendency to leak from one to the other, and either
hilarity or havoc ensues.

The Middle-Sized Bear is one of my favorite characters in Cordwainer Smith's story, Mark Elf. You'll find out all about him in the last section, titled
"Conversation with the Middle-Sized Bear". He formed part of my
"Mandelbear" persona on the old newsgroup alt.callahans, but
it was only a few years ago that I discovered that he was also a large
part of my personality as well.

For my money, The Gondoliers has the best music of any of the
G&S operettas; it's lush and lyrical and sparkling. And the
Lamplighters are a world class company, making the air ring with song in
San Francisco for just a few months shy of 60 years. In Colleen and my 38
years worth of season tickets we've never been disappointed.

Simply gorgeous. They're performing next weekend in Walnut Creek; it's
not to be missed if you're in the area and fond of such things.

This song was written in response to a challenge: my sister-of-choice
Naomi (whose birthday is today!) told me that she'd go with me to ConChord 2008 if I promised to sing a
song either by her or about her. By a month before the con I still hadn't
learned any of her songs, and was still struggling to write something,
when I happened to think back on how easy a time Colleen had had getting
through the airport with a wheelchair. This just fell out, then, as the
answer to ``I can walk, damnit! What do I need a wheelchair for?''

Wheelin'

When you see her in the evening in a bright green dress
Walking fast down the hallway you might never guess
That the lady has a weakness she's reluctant to confess.
No, you might not notice when she's dancing reels
That she made it through the airport on a set of wheels,
And she still isn't certain that she likes the way that it feels.

With her lover right behind her lookin' tired but proud
They were wheelin' their way through the airport crowd;
And the way it made her feel made her want to weep out loud.
'Cause they were cuttin' past the line at the TSA
Asking healthy young people to get out of her way
Savin' her strength to make it through another day.

When she has a good day she can walk a mile
Dance through the evening with grace and style
Greet her lover at the door with a tight embrace and a smile;
Next minute she's collapsing like she's half-way dead
With a fire in her body and an aching head
And she'll pay with pain and the rest of the weekend in bed.

So with her lover right beside her lookin' calm and cool
She walks up to the counter feeling like a fool
And tries to tell herself that a wheelchair's only a tool.
Soon she's wheelin' past the line at the TSA
Feeling weird watching people getting out of her way
But it's the easiest journey in years to the end of the day.

Well, her body is a battleground and life's a war,
And she's lost against her limits many times before;
But she's still fighting with a few new tricks in store;
Because a wheelchair is a weapon, not a mark of defeat
And she can stay standing longer with some time off her feet
The battle isn't over, and winning will be sweet.

With her lover right behind her lookin' fierce and proud
They'll be cutting a swath through the airport crowd
The way it makes her feel will make her want to laugh out loud.
'Cause she'll be wheelin' past the line at the TSA
Watchin' tough young punks scurry out of her way
Savin' her strength to make it through another day.

I've been wanting to post this Songs for Saturday for a while, only the
last couple got derailed somewhere along the way. Anyway, I'd like to
point you at Cat Faber's "Alice Day"
posts. The name is explained in a footnote to this post,
where Cat says,

I promised my friend Alice a new song every two weeks so she would have
new stuff to practice. This is where I'm putting them. I have been doing
this for a while, actually but this is the first time I have mentioned the
inspiration. So, Happy Alice Day.

Anyway, she's been posting a new song every couple of weeks since some
time in March, mostly with mp3's attached. Enjoy! They're all worth a
listen, but I think "Pepper-Spray
Pike" is one of the better ones. Never anger a bard..."The Atheist's
Anthem" is another good one, and captures a lot of what I, too,
believe.

There aren't any actual songs in this post. But soon! You see,
Naomi and I started a new duo, Lookingglass Folk, less than
two weeks ago.

One of our goals for this weekend's rehearsal session was to figure out
whether we would be able to take over the concert slot at Conflikt
originally scheduled for Tempered
Glass. We figured we'd probably know by Monday.

My former band, Tempered Glass, has fallen apart in a shower of jagged
shards. Naomi and I intend to keep making music together, and we're
pleased to announce that we are now a duo called Lookingglass Folk. We
are hoping to pull off our first concert at Conflikt next year, taking
advantage of the year's worth of planning and hard work we put into it as
Tempered Glass.

The next two months are going to be a wild ride for the two of us, but the
concert we're putting together is going to be worth it. I'm going up the
weekend after next for a rehearsal; we'll know then whether we
can pull it off. If we do, it will be something special.

I was originally going to post something entirely different today -- I
wanted to post one of my own love songs. Maybe I'll save it for February.
Because I started thinking about the internetcensorship laws
now being debated in the House, and what'sgoingon in New York, Davis, Seattle, and, well, just about everywhere...

Since the days of the Carlsbad Decrees and the Age of Metternich Die
Gedanken sind frei was a popular protest song against political
repression and censorship, especially among the banned Burschenschaften
student fraternities. In the aftermath of the 1848 German Revolution
the song was proscribed.

Really short one today, because I'm posting from Orycon away from my
familiar desktop, on a marginally-configured netbook. But I was impressed
by The Doubleclicks'
concert last night. Impressed enough to buy two copies of their CD -- one
for the wolfling daughter who decided to spend the weekend LARPing rather
than come down and enjoy the con.

There's a party today at Grand Central Starport, so the most obvious song to post for today is
Bigger On The
Inside, which I wrote 20 years ago (has it really been that long?)
following a usenet post about a visit (waves at liralen) to our
house.

No video (I suppose I ought to learn how to make those synchronized-image
things), but you'll find the audio here.

Our house is bigger on the inside than it looks from on the street
There must be something odd about the way the corners meet.
We warn our friends about it, but they always seem surprised,
And I sometimes can't imagine how our stuff all fits inside.
We have computers, toys, and magazines, and quiet cozy nooks;
The bathroom's lined with cedar planks, and the living room with books.
There's boxes full of God-knows-what in the attic up above,
And we always keep good company and love.
There's a gallery of science-fiction pictures in the hall,
And something's taped or bolted on to each square foot of wall.
Our daughters' closets look just like a baby dragon's hoard;
It's true that we're disorganized, but at least we're seldom bored.
Colleen is halfway buried as she crochets up a quilt
I'm getting in some songs before my voice begins to wilt.
Kids are shouting back in Emmy's room, the pizza's getting hot;
Folks come over every Wednesday whether we're at home or not.
There's a guest crashed on the futon couch who's too wiped out to leave,
And something in the fridge that's been there since last Christmas eve.
We're packed in five dimensions, and through the twilight zone,
It's all the friendly clutter here that makes it feel like home.

At the Younger Daughter's insistence, I have pluralized "daughters" in
verse 2, and at the older's insistance changed the name in verse
3, both to reflect current reality.

The song that immediately popped into my head was Needle Of Death --
it was on his first album, which I bought close to the year it came out,
1965. I think it's still the only album of his I ever owned, but his
sharp-edged songwriting and astoundingfingerpicking left
a lasting impression.

Just a quickie today, since I'm traveling and away from my usual posting
client, but this is way too good to leave on the shelf until it becomes
seasonal. If you love mathematics, or are a fan of xkcd, you really need to go over
to YouTube and watch/listen to The Gauss Christmath
Special by the amazingly wacko Vi Hart. Then go check
out Pachelbel's Music Box Canon in D. I could go on. And on.

Every
once in a while a song, or a songwriter, grabs me. Call it New
Song Energy. If I'm really lucky
it's a new song of mine, but mostly it's somebody else.

It's not so often that it's someone whose name I can't hope to pronounce,
writing in a language I don't understand. I'm damned if I know why nobody
seems to have recorded English versions of Trịnh Công Sơn's
songs except maybe that, judging from the translations I've seen, it's
unlikely that singable translations exist. Which is a damned shame.

I was pointed at Trinh by a coworker, our lovely Vietnamese lab tech
Gloria, on my last day at EWS. We had a good talk. She gave me a
freshly-picked pluot to give to Colleen, and the name "Trịnh Công Sơn"
written on a post-it note.

This afternoon, climbing a hill, singing on top of corpses
I have seen, I have seen
On the road, people holding each other and running to hide
This afternoon, climbing a hill, singing on top of corpses
I have seen, I have seen
In a garden, a mother holding her child's lifeless body
A mother claps her hands and celebrates her child's corpse
A mother claps and cheers for peace
People clap their hands for more harmony
People clap their hands for more miserable hardship

It's about the Massacre at Huế. I grew up with this stuff on TV, and Bob Dylan and
Phil Ochs on vinyl.